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Fury at no Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

MARK COLVIN: Some of America's best fiction writers have gone home empty-handed after the Pulitzer Prize judges failed to agree on a winning novel.

Denis Johnson, Karen Russell and the late David Foster Wallace were on the shortlist for the most prestigious award in US literature.

But the Pulitzer board couldn’t reach a majority decision so they cancelled this year's $10,000 prize for fiction.

It's not the first time it's happened and it's sparked an intense debate about the judging process.

Emily Bourke reports.

EMILY BOURKE: Winners are grinners and among them is Matt Apuzzo who's been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism.

He and his colleagues at Associated Press uncovered widespread and systematic spying on Muslims by New York's Police Department.

MATT APUZZO: Everybody says you know it's great to be out front, it's great to be driving a story and it's fun to be part of a story that you are driving and that you are all alone on.

It can get kind of lonely when you are out driving a story and you are all alone and suddenly it seems like oh my God, I'm all alone. And that's a good thing but it's also a scary thing.

EMILY BOURKE: But the toast to fine writing doesn't extend to fiction. Of the more than 340 novels reviewed, not one was deemed worthy of this year's Pulitzer.

SIG GISSLER: Many awards just have one jury and that's it. We have a jury that comes up with the three finalists and then the board is the second step in the process and they make the final decision.

So it's a particularly rigorous judging system

EMILY BOURKE: Sig Gissler is the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes.

SIG GISSLER: It's unusual for it to happen but it can occur.

EMILY BOURKE: Does it suggest that there's been a dip in the quality of the literature that's been put to you?

SIG GISSLER: I don't think any decision like this is a statement about literature or fiction in general. It reflects the circumstances of the situation where no book receives a majority vote.

I don't think you should extrapolate from that some sweeping statement about the nature of, about the condition of fiction in America.

GEORDIE WILLIAMSON: It's extraordinary how hard it is for decent, honourable, thoughtful intelligent people to actually sit in a room and come to a final decision.

Taste is so necessarily subjective. Interests and approaches are so diverse that sometimes it's just impossible.

EMILY BOURKE: Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic at the Australian newspaper.

GEORDIE WILLIAMSON: In 1941 Hemingway got the gong from the jury For Whom the Bell Tolls. And the Pulitzer Committee then said, no because one of the Pulitzer members decided it was an immoral book.

That has happened a few times and most notoriously in 1974 where Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which is just one of the great bohemians of post war American literature, was chosen by the jury and the Pulitzer Committee said no way, it's disgusting and it's too long and we don't understand it so no prize awarded this year.

EMILY BOURKE: Publishers, authors and booksellers are fuming; insulted that the judges couldn't choose a winner.

For the industry it's a missed opportunity for unparalleled sales and to push forward a new writer.

But the Pulitzer's Sig Gissler says not all is lost.

SIG GISSLER: I think the three finalists, while they'll be some disappointment, they are also, of course one is deceased, but the two living ones will be I think pleased to be named a Pulitzer finalist because that in itself is a high accolade.

EMILY BOURKE: But critic Geordie Williamson says the prize is stuck between the reading and writing worlds and the real world.

GEORDIE WILLIAMSON: These days there are professionals who read books and think about them and talk about them and write about them and there are busy professionals who probably, when the jury submits to their committee their three or four or five choices, they will be the only novels that they read this year.

So what's happened is a disconnect between those reading communities and the people who actually it falls upon to decide the award. They don't meet.